paid by the hour at the rate of from four ten cents, according to the kind of work done.

The advantages of the industrial system are manifold, making it, in my opinion, essential to a thorough training school for freedmen, if not for all classes of people. The chief objection is on the ground of expense: the industries are at a great disadvantage, and are apt to lose money, although the last year at Hampton was most encouraging financially. The higher the result, the greater is likely to be the cost.

The real financial question as to manual-labor schools is this: Shall the expense of teaching a student a trade, and of making him self-reliant and manly, be met in the same way as is that of teaching him mathematics and Greek? It may cost twice as much to train the hands and head together as to train the head alone.

When this is understood, and people care enough for educated laborers and complete manhood to pay their cost, they will have industrial schools and will get the worth of their money.

The system is complicated; there is constant friction between labor and study; and only capacity and energy can insure the end desired. At Hampton one-fifth of the school time is taken for work, students working one whole school day, each week besides Saturdays. Their progress is not seriously retarded. Under pressure the rate of study is increased.

With this method, there may be less of mathematics, but more manhood. Poor students can be educated without being pauperized, for none are made objects of charity. The discipline of hard work keeps away the indolent, but attracts the determined and deserving, endows the graduate with a spirit of selfreliance and of manliness, and provides him with resources that will insure his success in the world. Out of poverty comes strength; victory awaits the man who fights it out with only himself on his side.

Labor must be required of all; non-workers being an aristocracy ruinous to manual-labor schools.

Under this system the graduate becomes more than a pedagogue. He becomes a civilizer, able not only to encourage the young idea, but to work to advantage the exhausted lands about him, and by example and precept to teach right ideas of life and duty.

Such men are needed for a race whose greatest danger is in the bad leadership of demagogues, whose chief temptation is to get a living by something else than hard work, and whom the bait of office has too often allured from honest, useful lives.

The colored race, like every race, can secure for itself an honorable position only by toil. Its destiny is not yet assured; it is on trial; its future will be determined by its leaders.

An elaborate course of study, making them polished scholars, would unfit our graduates for the hog-and-hominy fare and lowly cabin life that awaits most of the workers in our poor and sparsely-settled country. A three or four years' course commencing with the rudiments, requiring of beginners a knowledge of reading and writing and the first rules of arithmetic, and embracing, among other things, the elements of grammar, mathematics, science, and history, is enough.

There is such a thing as over-education; it is like rigging a ship heavily without ballasting her. This must be a guarded point in a school which is intended to be a means to an end.

The normal-school graduate of the South should be of the people—above them, yet of them-in order to make natural or probable a life-long service in their behalf. A highly-educated negro is as little likely as a highly-educated white man to do a work against which his tastes and sensibilities would every day rebel. If we depend upon the lofty missionary spirit that leads the best of men and women to devote themselves to the lowly, we shall find at home, as we do abroad, few laborers in a wide harvest-field.

The following qualifications, among others, we expect from the graduates of our school:

Ability to teach the rudiments of knowledge in the best manner. Capacity to govern youth and inspire them with a love for their studies. Character and behavior fitted to influence the communities in which they live, and to destroy prejudice.

An intelligent purpose to advocate temperance, thrift, and education. Power to distinguish between the true and the false lights that surround and confuse the minds of the people.

Willingness to labor in Sunday schools and in the spread of Christian morality and Bible truth.

This is not asking too much of the best class of colored youth. They are adapted to teaching; are quick to imitate good teachers; they find in this occupation better pay than in any other open to them. Solicitations to leave it are feeble, except some times from political quarters, and prejudice and persecution are no longer serious obstacles.

The colored teacher is looked up to for his wisdom, is often chosen magistrate or other local dignitary, and is some times the only source of information from the outside world.

An old negro once said of a young colored girl who taught in a most benighted place on the "Eastern Shore," both in public and Sunday schools, and read the papers to the people who could not read, and was president of their "Good-Samaritan" society, "She is an angel to us."

We could not ask better material or prospects: we only ask support in our work.

Virginia to-day should have three hundred good colored teachers, and can not get them.

North Carolina requires quite as many, and the need is increasing faster than the supply.

Justice and the welfare of our country demand that means be supplied adequate to lift the illiterate masses of the South to a degree of intelligence suited to their needs, and sufficient to prevent those social and political combinations of ignorant men that are unquestionably the most threatening danger of our future.

The Anglo-Saxon is the embodiment of force, and throngs the ways that lead to success of every kind. The negro, with the chains of centuries just fallen from his limbs, stretches out his hands in passionate entreaty for a little help,

for light to see. Without force, in mental darkness, emancipation is so far but a physical, not a moral fact.

He does not cry for food and clothes; four millions of ex-slaves have thrown scarcely a pauper upon the country. The old slave's dream of forty acres and a mule is of the past. He is meeting his fate manfully, and only asks for work and schools.

Give him fair wages and good instruction, and the negro question will be settled; this generation will have done the duty assigned to it by God who gave us the victory, and the greatest moral triumph of the century will be accomplished.

The negro has falsified the predictions of his enemies, and dispelled the fears of his friends. They said he would give himself to riot and plunder; but he earned the gratitude of the South by his fidelity to the family and the plantation, while his master was fighting against his freedom. They said the freedmen would not work; but he raised in one year nearly four million bales of cotton. They ridiculed "Sambo" in uniform; but the steady lines at Petersburg and the charge at Fort Wagner attest his heroism.

What grander enterprise could there be than to take up the cause of a race like this-the pariahs of the peoples-distrusting their old guides and suspecting their present leaders, and prepare for them with timely zeal, and by wise methods, an army of educators who shall give tone to their character, direction to their ideas, and, by moulding the now plastic material, secure a well-laid and solid foundation, upon which the workmen of the future shall build to the honor of the race and of the nation, and to the glory of God.

After the reading of Gen. ARMSTRONG's paper, Miss ANNA C. BRACKETT, BRACKETT, of New York, presented the following paper.

THE AMERICAN NORMAL SCHOOL.

Man is characterized and distinguished by his power of carrying on the process of synthesis and generalization. In this he takes up into one whole, rejecting accidental details, all previous results, and considers these, upon which he has spent so much effort, well employed, if they will serve only as the minutest part of a new conclusion. And this, again, is good only to be used as material for another. He is always at work, as it were, in the quarry. To the animal, no problem exists, because all problems have been solved for him by infinite intelligence, whose results the animal ignorantly works out. The bee is only a reflection of the infinite thought as it shapes its cell, the ant as it excavates its winding galleries, the beaver as it builds its dam, the coral zoöphyte as it buds and grows from its parent stem. But all these are unconscious in their reflection, and repeat the same perfect result, century after century. Man alone gathers together the results of his previous work, and uses so much of them as are by him recognized to be a part of the divine thought- as much of them as are Truth-the condensed essence of the work of all the years before. The result of such a process we have in the laws of science, the rules of art, the maxims of political economy, the codes of ethics, and the established formulæ of all professions.

For what are these but the condensed results of the experience of man in these departments ever since he has existed? He has always found himself face to face with problems, which he has solved, but from every solution has stepped forth a new problem. Each question devours itself and seeks again for food with a larger demand; and when man finds, not a disappointment, but his highest satisfaction, in detecting the new and more difficult problem as the final result of his work, does he most clearly testify to his divine and immortal

nature.

But man is not only an individual, the heir to his own individual results, but, as a member of the human family, has a birthright to its heritage of culture and results. The philosophers of the Rousseau school are the most self-contradictory of all in their demand that each shall work out these results for himself. Had they been educated on their own plan, they would never have proceeded far enough to make their own demand. As the son of the English nobleman is not ashamed, but proud, to hold his estates from a long line of ancestors, receiving the accumulated benefits of centuries for his own, as the strongest testimony that he is a lineal representative of that family, so should the reasonable man not unwillingly, but proudly, receive the inheritance of culture, the offering of which is an acknowledgment of his kinship to all the greatest and the best. Only the shallow can refuse to accept his legacy, and the soul of every real reformer must be

Touched with reverence deep and true

For the lessons of the past,

Where the lives of priest and sage,
Half-said truths of every age,

Are our heritage at last.

But, as the English nobleman inherits not only the principles conferred by the Magna Charta and the conveniences, protection and luxuries which are the results of the civilization of the whole English nation, but also the wide fields and lofty castle which belong to his special family; so, while every man receives, in a sense, as his inheritance, the results of the labor of all the world, each profession has its own special riches. As members of the profession of teaching, our patrimony is rich, and our descent ancient and noble indeed; for, although we might recognize all great men, of whatever profession, as, in a certain sense, world-teachers, we can, assuredly, without fear of counter-assertions, claim in our own, in unbroken line, SOCRATES, PLATO, and ARISTOTLE. Least of all can we afford to disregard our heritage. Least of all can we afford to neglect the gathered wisdom of the centuries. The great principles of education—the great laws depending upon the nature of the human being, through whose guidance by gradual steps he must be led from his state of entire dependence at birth to entire independence, and the conscious possession of himself these it is the special function of the normal school to teach. In other words, as our system of public schools, crowned by the college, is supposed to give to its student a digest of the general information gained by the world up to that point of time, and then to dismiss him to the study or practice of the general principles acquired, in their special applications; so the normal school should give to its graduates the garnered results of the Science of Education and its rules as an art as obtained up to the present time, and then send its pupils forth to their application in particular schools.

It is the modern tendency, especially in America, to undervalue regular courses of education and to approve of what is called self-education: in general, we are pointed to those who are not college graduates, and who are, nevertheless, celebrated men; and in special, to those who have had no professional training and who are yet successful teachers. But I think no one will deny the truth of the following words, which I quote from an eminent authority.

"The self-taught man has often true talent and even genius, to whose development, however, inherited culture has been denied, and he may, by good fortune, through his own strength, work his way into a field of labor. But even

if he has for years studied and practiced much, he is still haunted by a feeling of uncertainty as to whether he has yet reached the stand-point at which a science, an art, or a trade, will publicly receive him—of so very great consequence is it that men should be comprehended and recognized by man. The self-taught man, therefore, remains embarrassed, and is never free from the apprehension that he may expose some weak point to an adversary who is thoroughly educated—or, he falls into the other extreme: he becomes presumptuous, steps forth as a reformer, and if he accomplishes nothing, or earns only ridicule, he sets himself down as a martyr, unrecognized by an unappreciative and unjust world.

"It is possible that the self-taught man may be on the right track, and may accomplish as much or even more than one trained in the usual way. In general, however, it is very desirable that every man should go through the regular course, the inherited means of education—partly that he may be thorough in the elements, partly to free him from the anxiety which he feels, lest he, in his solitary efforts, spend labor on some superfluous work-superfluous because done long before, but of which, through the accident of his want of culture, he had not heard."

We shall probably not require much time to recall to our minds instances of the last-mentioned waste of labor among our own fraternity; and those of us who may have been obliged to try in our schools experiments which we knew had repeatedly failed in others—or, who have avoided trying them only by wearying arguments with committees who presented to us plans to them new and attractive, but to us old, and known to have been long since tried and found wanting those of us who have expended in such contests the energy which would have been much better spent in our teaching, will need no other enforcement of the truth of our author's words. It were, perhaps, unreasonable to expect that school-committees should inform themselves of what has been done and established in education, before they state so positively what should be done; but it is not unreasonable to hope that the time will come when every diplomad graduate of every normal school shall have some fair knowledge of the history of education in the past and the laws which that history has evolved.

In the truth of our author's words lies the ground for the establishment of normal schools, and, to make once more the general statement, it is the special work of the normal school, first, to present to its pupils, as far as they are able to take them much farther than they are able then fully to comprehend them, the ripened results of all the thought of the world on the subject of